The invention relates to a method of modeling a closed surface geometry and in particular to a method of modeling a closed surface geometry using a mesh having a reduced number of polygons.
Many branches of biomedical science and engineering require geometric modeling of various parts of the human body. The success of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and other imaging modalities of computer aided tomography have lead to many achievements in scientific visualization of parts of the human body. Typical methods based on slice data generate models containing hundreds of thousands of triangles that provide excellent details for 3D visualizations, but cannot be used directly for scientific analysis with numerical methods due to their huge size and lack of smoothness.
There exist methods that substantially reduce (more than 90%) the number of triangles in the model, but these methods are still unsatisfactory for analytical purposes. These methods were designed specifically to preserve the topology of the original geometry produced from slice data and, therefore, are subject to possible noise influence that results in holes and other irregularities of geometry.
Conventional methods do not reduce the number of triangles to a desired level. To alleviate these problems, scientists use drastically simplified models for their analysis. These models may be either spheres or cylinders of appropriate size and position. A drawback to the use of known geometry (e.g. spheres, cylinders, etc.) is that the models do not approximate the surface to be modeled with sufficient accuracy. There is a perceived need in the art for models that satisfy the requirement of computational simplicity and at the same time approximate the parts of the body more accurately than known geometry such as spheres and cylinders.